Evidence that Demands a Verdict
a sermon based on 1 John 4:7-21
by Rev. Thomas Hall

Evidence that demands a verdict. That was my mission a number of years ago as I gathered with eighteen others in the living room of a large Victorian mansion. We were there to participate in our first Murder Mystery weekend. We had all been sent our scripts weeks in advance so that we could practice acting and looking like suspicious characters. So on Saturday night I sat down for dinner with such infamous characters as Richard Hurtin’, Police Chief Korruptki, Auntie Pasta, and John and Jane Dough. And for the next hour we exchanged fibs, bold-faced lies, misinformation, and motives as to why we could knock somebody off. Then, shortly after supper it happened. Just after violinist, Tonya Triptovich finished playing the Blue Danube Waltz, Capa Chino-a mobster-clutched his throat and fell to his knees.

After a ten-minute amateur death scene, the stiff was carried out of the room. Then as Sherlock Holmes, it was my job to wade through the alibis and come up with some criteria that would lead us to the villain. I knew it had to be Auntie Pasta because she had this huge chef’s hat into which she could’ve stuffed baseball bats, arsenic, and a small canon. But when the dust cleared we discovered that the villain was an obscure guy with droopy, brown eyes who wouldn’t have hurt a fly-unless, of course, it owed him money. He just didn’t look like a bad guy. Evidence that demands a verdict.

The search for evidence that demands a verdict is hilarious when it’s done on weekends and with people you’ve never met. But not so fun when that search for evidence leads up to our own front door, when we ourselves are on trial. And that’s where our epistle lesson puts us this morning-up on the witness stand.

We’re asked for evidence not to convict us of some heinous crime but evidence that convicts us of life. We’re all up there crowded into the witness stand-this congregation; the ushers, the bass section of the choir-even the preacher. We all must give an answer. How do we know that we know God? What evidence can we provide to show that we’re in a growing, vital 24-7 conversation with God? Or to borrow the words of our campmeeting preachers, how do we know that we’re being born again?

Our answers are probably as diverse as the characters in a murder mystery weekend. If push came to shove in this search for evidence, what criteria would we most cling to as evidence that the vertical relationship is okay? Let me suggest several criteria that I feel are important pieces of evidence for vital Christian faith.

Water Baptism. That’s a very good piece of evidence to begin with. Water baptism does begin the Christian journey. But are we to rest on that slender single experience as the most confirming evidence for the rest of our lives? Well, what about confirmation? Well, confirmation does serve as another very important step that makes mom and dad’s faith our own. At confirmation, we con-firm our baptism and affirm our own desire to renounce the spiritual forces of wickedness and repent of our sins; we confess Jesus Christ as our Savior and place our full trust in him. But taken by itself, confirmation can become just another buzz word, another rites of passage after which we can decide on our own whether we want to stay home and catch a few more zzzz’s or attend church to catch a few more zzzz’s.

Right belief is the single most confirming evidence of a living faith! Well, what we believe is very important to a growing, flourishing Christian faith. In fact, for me, orthodoxy was the single most important criteria that determined whether or not one had a growing relationship with God. Being doctrinally correct on selected issues was the essence of my young faith. However, I have come to discover that even the doctrinal A, B, C’s may take a back seat to something else. Even having the right answers can come up short when we’re on the witness stand.

I k n o o o o w what you’re driving at! This is a tricky way to get to the theme of prayer, right? Could our prayer life indicate that we’ve left the light on when it comes to our relationship with God. I have a book in my office called, Don’t Just Stand There, Pray Something. The author claims that prayer means that "I never have to say, ‘There’s nothing I can do.’" He goes on to say that "we can do something, something great, as great as Jesus did. We don’t have to stand there, we can pray something." Yes, being on good speaking terms with God is a vital life sign for the Christian community. Yet, prayer alone is not the most important quality of a living body of Jesus. Apart from one other criteria, even prayer may be found wanting in God’s great balance.

We haven’t even mentioned social justice yet! Translating the gospel into shelters, boycotts, warm meals, lobbying and marching, compassion, and job retraining needs to be expressed in tangible, social ways. Our faith teaches us to reach out to the very same folks that Jesus once reached out to-persons who don’t have the power, people who don’t have a voice, or if they do, it is drowned out by the rancor of special interest groups. Some of our college students in this congregation will tell you the stories of broken lives that they encountered when they when they go to help agencies in New York City each month. A church without a sense of mission has removed itself from the Vine. Yet our lesson points to the one criteria that gives social outreach meaning. Without this quality, mission in the church becomes just another social agency.

The born again experience is surely the best evidence of a real and authentic Christian’s life. That must be what evidence we’re hunting for. A deeply moving experience does change lives. Just ask Willie-a former junkie-who came to this very church to tell us of one transforming experience that put him on another path. Just ask Kevin Friedrichs, an ex-biker or even your pastor, an ex-good guy. Just ask many scattered throughout our churches around the world. One third of adult Americans classify themselves as born-againers. Yet as our lesson searches for an evidence in the life of this church, we push past even this important experience.

In fact, if what the writer of 1st John insists upon is correct, we may well have to push beyond baptism, confirmation, right belief, prayer, social justice and new birth experiences. What’s left? you may ask. What other criteria could we possibly need to attest to a living faith? What further proof do we need that we are healthy Christians-in-the-making?

Let me be honest and say that I believe every piece of every shred of evidence that we have broached this morning. Every one of these proofs are important accouterments of a flourishing Christian life, of a flourishing Christian community. Yet let me add one more criteria to our list:

Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God,

For God is love . . . if we love one another, God lives in us and His love is perfected in us.

Love, or agape is the single piece, the one criteria that gives meaning to everything else we say or do in God’s name. Though we know the Apostle’s Creed and can recite The Lord’s Prayer and have not agape, we are a noisy gong or a clanging bell. Though we have had experiences in God that take us into God’s holy presence but lack agape it does us no good. And though we feed the hungry and rescue the perishing and have not agape, we are nothing.

To have this quality of agape in this community is to have God living within us; so that in a sense, we carry within us a God-ness that urges us toward selfless acts of random kindness. And impulse toward good and not evil, toward denial, not self-interest, toward a self-esteem that is fulfilled in assisting another.

So the aged writer of 1st John writes his last words to a community that he is about to leave and tells them over and over again never to lose their ability to love. Agape, he says, is the confirming evidence par excellence that we are Christians and that God has taken up residence within us that we have moved into God’s neighborhood.

When our lesson says, "God’s love was revealed among us in this way," it means that God is not a snoozing professor sitting in a dusty study mumbling on about love like it’s some arcane, esoteric theological concept. Instead, God became the Divine Actor who so desperately loved humanity that he burst on to the stage of a world gone amuck and defined love for us. He came to us in Technicolor, 3-D flesh and blood reality; with no make-up or retakes. God came to us in the raw material of humanity that knows pain, passion, defeat, death, and now resurrection. God premiered love in four acts: " crucified, dead, buried, and on the third day he rose from the dead."

And now, the writer proclaims that we are God’s actors in the world. As he demonstrated love, so we are called to do the same. The world is starving for God’s actors to come on to the stage and to demonstrate our love for one another and the world. Yet too many times they’ve come to the theater hurting and in need of hope only to see a black white re-run about what Christians believe, do or don’t do, shoulda, coulda, woulda.

Believe, experience, and love abide, but the greatest of these is _________. I invite you to finish the sentence in your life this week. Amen.